got

The same spelling serves two verbs, and here it is the past of get across all its meanings: obtained, received, fetched, became. We got the last bus home; it got cold. The got of plain possession is a present tense instead, and its past is the unrelated had: they got a car now, they had one then.

In the perfect, it can report either a change or a plain state. By that time we'd got very cold tells of becoming. I've got two children tells of having, not acquiring, and in questions the have moves forward: how many children have you got? That possessive have got is also the frame for the obligation sense, have got to.

Drop the have from have got to and this is what remains: I got to go study. Carole King and Gerry Goffin's “Smackwater Jack” (1971) puts it in a lyric about setting out to restore order. Songs and relaxed speech suit it well. In careful writing, have to or must is the safer choice.

The obligation lives in the whole phrase have got to, and it is at home in contractions: I've got to study, she's got to go. In this meaning the verb has no participles, so there is nothing like having got to. It stays in the present, and where another form is needed, have to does the work.

Possession with the auxiliary gone: they got a new car, he got a lot of nerve. It is the same loss of have heard in the casual “got to”, and some speakers go further and inflect it as he gots. Because it is regional and nonstandard, use have or have got wherever the setting is formal.

Singlish and Manglish use it in the pattern of Chinese 有 (Hokkien ū, Cantonese jau⁵, Mandarin yǒu) and of Malay ada, words that cover both having and there being. It never changes form and often does without a subject: Got ants over here. Alfian Sa'at's Corridor (1999) frames a question with it: “Got lighter or not?”

Placed before a bare verb, it asks or tells whether something has happened at all: You got shower? I got ski before. Its closest English partner is ever, and it pairs naturally with before. Fiona Chan, writing in The Sunday Times of Singapore in 2010, catches its tone: “You got send meh? I never receive leh.”

Insistence is the work here: I got tell them just now stresses that the telling really took place. The shape matches the experiential marker, but that one is about whether something has ever happened. This one presses that a particular act, often a recent one, was carried out.

Routine is the point: I got cook meals for them describes a regular duty, not one dinner. A question like You got play badminton? asks about a habit, yet it has the same shape as the experiential marker. Context decides whether the speaker means a pastime or a single occasion.

A settled plan counts as real here: I got go Taiwan next year. Because the marker records fact rather than time, it sits on a future trip as comfortably as on a past event. The verb after it stays bare, with no to in between, which keeps it apart from English have got to.